Inside the second — and worse — stage of Trump’s agenda

Trump’s Big Ugly Bill delivers $170 billion for border and immigration enforcement.

This is on the scale of supplemental budgets passed by the United States when we enter war.

ICE will add 10,000 agents to the 20,000 already on the streets.

Its annual budget for detentions will skyrocket from $3.4 billion in the current fiscal year to $45 billion until the end of the 2029 fiscal year. That’s a 365 percent increase.

Funding for ICE detentions will exceed funding for the entire federal prison system.

When government capacity is built out this way, there’s always political and bureaucratic pressure to utilize such capacity. Supply creates its own demand.

“They pass that bill, we’re gonna have more money than we ever had to do immigration enforcement,” Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said recently, adding, “You think we’re arresting people now? You wait till we get the funding to do what we got to do.”

Which means that the number of people detained in ICE facilities — numbering 56,397 as of June 15 — will likely grow dramatically. A four-fold increase in the detention budget could mean a quarter of a million people locked up.

Don’t fall for the Trump regime’s lie that these people are criminals. As of now, 71.7 percent of ICE detainees have no criminal record. Some have been hardworking members of their communities for decades.

Even before the huge increase in funding, Trump aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded that immigration agents arrest 3,000 people a day.

That’s triple the number of daily arrests that agents were making between February and April.

Given that border-crossing numbers have plummeted, just meeting this 3,000-per-day target will require far more aggressive enforcement in non-border communities nationwide.

Big Democratic cities will be hit hardest. In a recent social media post, Trump called on ICE officials to “expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”

How will ICE agents know whom to round up and detain? The crude reality is that they’ll focus on anyone looking Latino or with surnames ending in “z.”

There are 65.2 million Latinos in the United States, the vast majority of whom are citizens. Inevitably, some American citizens will be swept up, arrested, and detained.

As the number of raids on workers and families escalates, ICE agents will engage in more warrantless knocks on doors, searches, and arrests.

And more of these agents will mask themselves to avoid being held responsible for their actions — an abuse of power commonly associated with Eastern Bloc police states.

This giant federal police effort will be supported by a supercharged surveillance system, also financed by Trump’s Big Ugly Bill. The Department of Homeland Security is joining with the Department of Government Efficiency to create the federal government’s first national citizenship data bank.

According to The New York Times, Palantir corporation’s software will be used to combine data gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service. Meanwhile, the administration wants access to citizens’ and others’ bank account numbers and medical claims.

The regime will not limit the purpose of its growing internal police apparatus to deporting undocumented people.

Trump is already attacking the citizenship of people born in the United States to parents who may or may not have been citizens at the time of their birth — so-called “birthright citizenship.”

The regime is also going after naturalized citizens (born outside the United States), using a McCarthy-era law that the Justice Department then used to sniff out former Nazis who lied their way into becoming American citizens — a law that allows the Department to “denaturalize,” or strip, someone’s citizenship.

According to a memo issued to Department lawyers last month by Attorney General Pam Bondi, denaturalization should be aimed at anyone who may “pose a potential danger to national security” — a standard so vague as to allow the Department to expel people from the country based on unsubstantiated claims or even on their negative opinions about Trump.

Trump has already publicly called for deporting “bad people … many of them [who] were born in our country.”

Last week, Andy Ogles, a Republican congressman, asked Bondi to investigate whether New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — who was born in Uganda and naturalized in 2018 — should be subject to denaturalization proceedings because he “publicly glorifies” people connected to Hamas in a rap song.

Bondi has not publicly responded to the letter.

The coming expansion of Trump’s police state under the Big Ugly Bill — featuring total surveillance, 10,000 ICE agents, and a network of detention facilities — will mark an escalation of Trump’s authoritarianism — using the pretext of an immigrant crime wave that does not exist.

What you can do:

1. Protect the vulnerable. If anyone in your community is confronted by ICE agents demanding proof of citizenship, make sure they know they have a right to remain silent and to refuse consent to searches of their cars, homes, or persons.

Red cards with this and other pertinent information are available in various languages. You can download and print them for free here.

2. Make sure you know your own rights. If stopped, you are not required to answer questions. You can refuse a search of your person, car, or belongings. If the agents proceed with a search despite your refusal, make it clear you do not consent. If you’re not under arrest, you can ask if you are free to go. If the answer is yes, leave.

If you or someone in your community believes rights have been violated, document everything you can of the encounter with ICE agents.

3. Finally, know that the purpose of Trump’s police state is to silence not just immigrants but the rest of us. Do not be intimidated or discouraged from speaking out, writing, demonstrating, boycotting, or undertaking any other nonviolent action in opposition to what the regime is doing.

To the contrary, become even more active. Share any abuses you witness (and, ideally, have recorded on your phone) as widely as possible, so that more people are apprised of what’s happening and are ready to join the resistance.

Be safe. Be careful. Have courage. Hug your loved ones.

NOW READ: The Supreme Court's timing couldn't be worse

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.